Managing your personal online reputation will be a core life skill

...managing your personal reputation will become a basic life/career skill as the way the world communicates becomes increasing oriented to the web.

Celebrities savaged in newsgroups? Business leaders being smeared in chat rooms? You can be sure that clued up publicists and communications advisors are looking into social media and wider web culture and how it can affect their clients' reputations.

But when think about the democratisation of media, the ubiquity of the means of production and distribution of content, the consumer-generated content revolution, all of the new opportunities for individuals, increasingly people are becoming cognisant of new threats to personal reputation.

Three stories yesterday gave me cause to reflect on social media and the growing power of personal reputation with regards to it:

1. The Times ran a story on "online personas" advising job candidates to think about what the Web says about them - are there dodgy stories about you on FriendsReunited.com? Have friends posted photos on Flickr. (NB: in reverse graduates in the UK looking for jobs also talk about how big corporates treat their candidates and new recruits at DoctorJob.com - a hidden, dusty corner of corporate reputation - I wonder how many corporates know what is being said about them...)
2. DontDateHimGirl.com: the New York Times reported on a website on which jilted women "out" men who have treated them badly.
3. Steve Rubel's being hired by Edelman: hired? Acquired more like. The company got more than than an individual's considerable skills and experience in social media, it acquired the Micropersuasion brand from CooperKatz, a brand which could not be separated from Mr Rubel, as it was so much a part of his personal online reputation.

From an individual's point of view: what do you do if you are slammed in DontDateHimGirl.com Sue? Complain? Could it affect your job chances if your past alleged misdeeds come up on Google when a potential employer or customer puts your name in?

If it's serious enough you may want to do both. But in the meantime its likely that you will need to look after your own reputation online. You would hopefully have a fairly positive / accurate profile out there already - if you are running a personal / professional blog you might want to rebut or set up a standalone site.

Just as with corporate communications it will bode better for you if you already have an established reputation and communications channels in place to deal with negative attention.

Extrapolate this out and you start to see that managing your personal reputation will become a basic life/career skill as the way the world communicates becomes increasing oriented to the web. Wealthier individuals may well require specialist personal advice in the same way that they now look to a financial adviser or personal trainer to help them. Could this be a new wider market for PR consultants, where to date it has been the preserve of the super rich?

You can see that there will certainly be a market for self-help advice and coaching in this area - perhaps the basics will be taught at college as part of preparing young people for their careers.

Comments

[Jack Yan]

It’s very true. Any new business colleague I’m introduced to these days, I Google. I can’t do it for entry-level folks, but the Google approach works for executives. It has been pretty faultless so far in the days of Web 1·0. People might be taught what they should write in the age of Web 2·0, namely things in line with what they believe are their career statements.

[Lion Kimbro]

At the same time, companies will have to **relax** their concept of what an employee does in their off time.

People will have to, in other words, get used to the idea that people are people, and have their independent lives.

Yes, the employee down the hall may have registered a BDSM kink on some MMORPG site, and you may well discover it by googling. Doesn't mean you have to bring it up at work, as long as they don't.

The successful business will respect the privacy of the individuals within it, and not care so much about where people come from.

Corporations will bend; They'll have to. If they don't, they will find their reputation under attack, as people scour to find whatever they can find on the people within it.

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[Reputacion Online]

Thanks for your post, Antony. It is amazing to discover you were in 2006 talking about (NoW) a lot of people are doing: online reputation and the importance of self-branding.

[Brisbane web designer]

So how do you recover a bad online reputation without resorting to a law suit?